State of the art of Serverless - Q1 2026 - Services

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The following section presents each of the six serverless platforms included in this study. For every provider, we outline the key characteristics of their Functions-as-a-Service offering, including the configuration used for testing, notable platform constraints, and any relevant architectural specifics. These profiles provide the context needed to interpret the values discussed in later sections.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda was introduced on November 13, 2014 Wikipedia, making it the service that effectively pioneered the FaaS category and set the standard that most subsequent offerings would follow. At its core, each Lambda instance runs within a lightweight, isolated environment powered by Firecracker microVMs.

As the longest-standing platform in this study, Lambda benefits from over a decade of production hardening and deep integration within the broader AWS ecosystem. Today, the service handles tens of trillions of invocations per month across more than 1.5 million users AWS — a scale that speaks to its maturity and reliability as a foundational building block of cloud-native architectures.

Azure Container App

Announced at Microsoft Ignite in November 2021 and reaching general availability in May 2022 AWS, Container Apps represents Microsoft's more modern take on serverless, designed specifically for containerized workloads. Rather than building on a proprietary runtime, it is underpinned by open-source CNCF projects, namely Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), and Envoy running on top of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). All-Things-Distributed-This architecture positions Azure Container Apps as a higher-level abstraction over Kubernetes, offering the flexibility of containers without the operational overhead of managing a cluster directly.

Google Cloud Run

Google's serverless journey began in February 2016 with Cloud Functions (1st gen), its initial event-driven FaaS offering. A second generation followed in August 2022, bringing significant performance and configurability improvements before Google rebranded the service as Cloud Run Functions in August 2024, merging its infrastructure with Cloud Run. The service retains the same event-driven model as its predecessors, now enriched with Cloud Run's controls for performance, scalability, and security. Under the hood, functions are deployed to Cloud Run and use Eventarc for event delivery InvGate, making Cloud Run Functions less of a standalone product and more of a higher-level abstraction layered on top of Google's broader container platform.

Oracle Cloud Functions

Oracle Functions reached general availability across all commercial regions in August 2019 positioning Oracle as a relatively late entrant into the FaaS market compared to other hyperscalers. The platform's most distinctive characteristic is its open-source foundation: OCI Functions is built on the Apache 2.0-licensed Fn Project, Docker, and CloudEvents, making it portable and vendor-neutral by design. Unlike proprietary runtimes from competing hyperscalers, the Fn Project can be downloaded and run anywhere, in any cloud or on-premises environments, giving organizations a degree of workload portability that is rare in the FaaS space.

T-Cloud FunctionGraph

FunctionGraph is the serverless compute offering from T-Cloud, the cloud platform operated by T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. A defining characteristic of FunctionGraph is its strong European identity: the service is operated in the EU under European management and is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with no access granted to non-European authorities. The underlying platform is built on Huawei FusionSphere, T-Systems' OpenStack-based infrastructure, and is certified against the BSI C5 catalogue, a compliance framework commonly required in the German enterprise market.

Scaleway Serverless Containers

Serverless Containers is one the FaaS offering from Scaleway, a French cloud provider and subsidiary of Iliad Group. Development began as early as 2019, with the product going through an extended beta period before reaching General Availability in November 2021. All Things Distributed As a European-born platform, Scaleway Functions carries a distinct identity in this study — positioned as an accessible, developer-friendly, and cost-conscious alternative to hyperscaler offerings. Under the hood, functions run on Knative, the open-source serverless framework built on Kubernetes, giving the platform a degree of portability and vendor-neutrality.